


That Which You Will Be

by Eromancery



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-15 22:57:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17537921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eromancery/pseuds/Eromancery





	That Which You Will Be

“Are you God?” She asked the man.”

It would have been a strange question, but the man did look very much like she had always sorta-but-not-seriously imagined God as looking like. Old man, white hair and bushy beard, Caucasian for some reason. More of a Santa, but her mental picture of Santa didn’t wear a purple bathrobe with the tetragrammaton emblazoned on it in gold.

The man let out a deep belly laugh, like the question of his divinity was the most amusing thing he’d heard all week.

“That’s a very good question,” he said. “Although some might say that a better question would be who isn’t God?”

She figured that only God would be pretentious enough to answer that question with a question, yet nice enough to make it sound like he was genuinely curious as to the answer, and decided to move on to her next question.

“Why are you a guy?”

“Two reasons: One, as your internal monologue went before, this is how you imagined I’d look, and therefore it’s the best for a casual conversation. Two, it’s an apology of sorts to you. I think I can handle pretending to be a man for a few minutes.”

“Right,” she said. “What the fuck is up with that? You made a mistake when you were designing me? Did you accidentally forget to move the sex slider but not the gender one?”

God clasped his hands together like he knew what she was going to ask before she did, which, given the whole omniscience thing, he probably did. Although to be fair, anyone who knew her probably would have know she’d ask that question anyway.

“Do you know the problem with being ineffable? No one ever bothers to argue with you.”

“Because you’re always right.”

“I’m only right when I want to be.”

“Why wouldn’t you want to be right?” she asked, confused.

“Because that’s what allows people to be good. By letting them argue that something needs to change. Like, say, realizing that all the idols in your father’s shop are false gods and smashing them. Or deciding that God’s decision to smite a city would be immoral if there were ten good men in it. And so on. Evil comes in when you just accept that bad things happen, and do nothing to change it.”

She smiled wryly. 

“Like just accepting that you have to kill your son?”

God shrugged. 

“Nobody’s perfect. Except for Enoch, I supposed. He was perfect. Cool guy, that Enoch. But I digress. By giving you the ability to recognize a wrong in the world, and right it, I’ve given you a chance to do good.”

“And all the abuse I suffered because of this? I never asked for this opportunity!” she asked, raising her voice to just below a yell, fueled by years of pain burning like so much dry wood.

“Few do. But you have it anyway.”  
“You have a sick sense of humor, you know that?”

“You’re not the first person to have said that. Personally, I think Depeche Mode said it best. But for what it’s worth, I am sorry. But someone had to carry this burden.”

Theological implications aside, an apology from God wasn’t worth too much to her.

“Bullshit! You don’t just get to put me through all that and then play it off with an apology! You’re God! You could have just reached down and made everything better without me having to suffer because you decided I should be the one to deal with all this shit!”

She felt tears well up in her eyes.

“You want to talk about right? Well this sure as fuck ain’t it! You’re seeing all this shit you could have prevented, doesn’t that make you evil?”

Her voice cracked, and she hated it. 

“How can you possibly think this was a good thing?”

It took her a few moments to realize that God was crying. Not much, but there were definitely tears in his eyes.

“The other worst thing about being ineffable,” he said, “Is that all the suffering you cause is the best course of action, and not being able to do anything to help the people you hurt. To know that you gave them these burdens to carry, but to ease them you’d either have to deny the world an opportunity to improve, or to deny humanity what makes it human. I truly am sorry. For everything.”

She acted without thinking, moving in and hugging the perfect, wretched, pathetic being in front of her. The moment her hands touched his bathrobe, she was suffused with a burning sensation of being loved, not just for one part of her, but for all of her, loved for the mere fact that she existed, cherished because she was her, and that was all she needed to be.

“Take this blessing: You are what you will be, and nothing can take that away from you.”

 

She awoke in the morning cloaked in the knowledge she had gleaned, cocooned in the love she still felt for herself, and determined to change this world for the better.


End file.
